OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On the Difficulty of Evolving Permutation Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2021
Year: 2021

Combinatorial designs provide an interesting source of optimization problems. Among them, permutation codes are particularly interesting given their applications in powerline communications, flash memories, and block ciphers. This paper addresses the design of permutation codes by evolutionary algorithms (EA) by developing an iterative approach. Starting from a single random permutation, new permutations satisfying the minimum distance constraint are incrementally added to the code by using a permutation-based EA. We investigate our approach against four different fitness functions targeting the minimum distance requirement at different levels of detail and with two different policies concerning code expansion and pruning. We compare the results achieved by our EA approach to those of a simple random search, remarking that neither method scales well with the problem size.
Intelligent edge-based recommender system for internet of energy applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Preserving energy in households and office buildings is a significant challenge, mainly due to the recent shortage of energy resources, the uprising of the current environmental problems, and the global lack of utilizing energy-saving technologies. Not to mention, within some regions, COVID-19 social distancing measures have led to a temporary transfer of energy demand from commercial and urban centers to residential areas, causing an increased use and higher charges, and in turn, creating economic impacts on customers. Therefore, the marketplace could benefit from developing an internet of things (IoT) ecosystem that monitors energy consumption habits and promptly recommends action to facilitate energy efficiency. This paper aims to present the full integration of a proposed energy efficiency framework into the Home-Assistant platform using an edge-based architecture. End-users can visualize their consumption patterns as well as ambient environmental data using the Home-Assistant user interface. More notably, explainable energy-saving recommendations are delivered to end-users in the form of notifications via the mobile application to facilitate habit change. In this context, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first attempt to develop and implement an energy-saving recommender system on edge devices. Thus, ensuring better privacy preservation since data are processed locally on the edge, without the need to transmit them to remote servers, as is the case with cloudlet platforms.
Approximate Bayesian Computation for Physical Inverse Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Semiconductor device models are essential to understand the charge transport in thin film transistors (TFTs). Using these TFT models to draw inference involves estimating parameters used to fit to the experimental data. These experimental data can involve extracted charge carrier mobility or measured current. Estimating these parameters help us draw inferences about device performance. Fitting a TFT model for a given experimental data using the model parameters relies on manual fine tuning of multiple parameters by human experts. Several of these parameters may have confounding effects on the experimental data, making their individual effect extraction a non-intuitive process during manual tuning. To avoid this convoluted process, we propose a new method for automating the model parameter extraction process resulting in an accurate model fitting. In this work, model choice based approximate Bayesian computation (aBc) is used for generating the posterior distribution of the estimated parameters using observed mobility at various gate voltage values. Furthermore, it is shown that the extracted parameters can be accurately predicted from the mobility curves using gradient boosted trees. This work also provides a comparative analysis of the proposed framework with fine-tuned neural networks wherein the proposed framework is shown to perform better.
Data Augmented 3D Semantic Scene Completion with 2D Segmentation Priors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Semantic scene completion (SSC) is a challenging Computer Vision task with many practical applications, from robotics to assistive computing. Its goal is to infer the 3D geometry in a field of view of a scene and the semantic labels of voxels, including occluded regions. In this work, we present SPAwN, a novel lightweight multimodal 3D deep CNN that seamlessly fuses structural data from the depth component of RGB-D images with semantic priors from a bimodal 2D segmentation network. A crucial difficulty in this field is the lack of fully labeled real-world 3D datasets which are large enough to train the current data-hungry deep 3D CNNs. In 2D computer vision tasks, many data augmentation strategies have been proposed to improve the generalization ability of CNNs. However those approaches cannot be directly applied to the RGB-D input and output volume of SSC solutions. In this paper, we introduce the use of a 3D data augmentation strategy that can be applied to multimodal SSC networks. We validate our contributions with a comprehensive and reproducible ablation study. Our solution consistently surpasses previous works with a similar level of complexity.
Testability-Aware Low Power Controller Design with Evolutionary Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

XORNet-based low power controller is a popular technique to reduce circuit transitions in scan-based testing. However, existing solutions construct the XORNet evenly for scan chain control, and it may result in sub-optimal solutions without any design guidance. In this paper, we propose a novel testability-aware low power controller with evolutionary learning. The XORNet generated from the proposed genetic algorithm (GA) enables adaptive control for scan chains according to their usages, thereby significantly improving XORNet encoding capacity, reducing the number of failure cases with ATPG and decreasing test data volume. Experimental results indicate that under the same control bits, our GA-guided XORNet design can improve the fault coverage by up to 2.11%. The proposed GA-guided XORNets also allows reducing the number of control bits, and the total testing time decreases by 20.78% on average and up to 47.09% compared to the existing design without sacrificing test coverage.
Jointly Learning Agent and Lane Information for Multimodal Trajectory Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Predicting the plausible future trajectories of nearby agents is a core challenge for the safety of Autonomous Vehicles and it mainly depends on two external cues: the dynamic neighbor agents and static scene context. Recent approaches have made great progress in characterizing the two cues separately. However, they ignore the correlation between the two cues and most of them are difficult to achieve map-adaptive prediction. In this paper, we use lane as scene data and propose a staged network that Jointly learning Agent and Lane information for Multimodal Trajectory Prediction (JAL-MTP). JAL-MTP use a Social to Lane (S2L) module to jointly represent the static lane and the dynamic motion of the neighboring agents as instance-level lane, a Recurrent Lane Attention (RLA) mechanism for utilizing the instance-level lanes to predict the map-adaptive future trajectories and two selectors to identify the typical and reasonable trajectories. The experiments conducted on the public Argoverse dataset demonstrate that JAL-MTP significantly outperforms the existing models in both quantitative and qualitative.
POEM: 1-bit Point-wise Operations based on Expectation-Maximization for Efficient Point Cloud Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Real-time point cloud processing is fundamental for lots of computer vision tasks, while still challenged by the computational problem on resource-limited edge devices. To address this issue, we implement XNOR-Net-based binary neural networks (BNNs) for an efficient point cloud processing, but its performance is severely suffered due to two main drawbacks, Gaussian-distributed weights and non-learnable scale factor. In this paper, we introduce point-wise operations based on Expectation-Maximization (POEM) into BNNs for efficient point cloud processing. The EM algorithm can efficiently constrain weights for a robust bi-modal distribution. We lead a well-designed reconstruction loss to calculate learnable scale factors to enhance the representation capacity of 1-bit fully-connected (Bi-FC) layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our POEM surpasses existing the state-of-the-art binary point cloud networks by a significant margin, up to 6.7 %.
Keep It Unbiased: A Comparison Between Estimation of Distribution Algorithms and Deep Learning for Human Interaction-Free Side-Channel Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Evaluating side-channel analysis (SCA) security is a complex process, involving applying several techniques whose success depends on human engineering. Therefore, it is crucial to avoid a false sense of confidence provided by non-optimal (failing) attacks. Different alternatives have emerged lately trying to mitigate human dependency, among which deep learning (DL) attacks are the most studied today. DL promise to simplify the procedure by e.g. evading the need for point of interest selection or the capability of bypassing noise and desynchronization, among other shortcuts. However, including DL in the equation comes at a price, since working with neural networks is not straightforward in this context. Recently, an alternative has appeared with the potential to mitigate this dependence without adding extra complexity: Estimation of Distribution Algorithm-based SCA. In this paper, we compare these two relevant methods, supporting our findings by experiments on various datasets.
Towards Explainable End-to-End Prostate Cancer Relapse Prediction from H&E Images Combining Self-Attention Multiple Instance Learning with a Recurrent Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Clinical decision support for histopathology image data mainly focuses on strongly supervised annotations, which offers intuitive interpretability, but is bound by expert performance. Here, we propose an explainable cancer relapse prediction network (eCaReNet) and show that end-to-end learning without strong annotations offers state-of-the-art performance while interpretability can be included through an attention mechanism. On the use case of prostate cancer survival prediction, using 14,479 images and only relapse times as annotations, we reach a cumulative dynamic AUC of 0.78 on a validation set, being on par with an expert pathologist (and an AUC of 0.77 on a separate test set). Our model is well-calibrated and outputs survival curves as well as a risk score and group per patient. Making use of the attention weights of a multiple instance learning layer, we show that malignant patches have a higher influence on the prediction than benign patches, thus offering an intuitive interpretation of the prediction. Our code is available at www.github.com/imsb-uke/ecarenet.
Streamlining Evaluation with ir-measures
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

We present ir-measures, a new tool that makes it convenient to calculate a diverse set of evaluation measures used in information retrieval. Rather than implementing its own measure calculations, ir-measures provides a common interface to a handful of evaluation tools. The necessary tools are automatically invoked (potentially multiple times) to calculate all the desired metrics, simplifying the evaluation process for the user. The tool also makes it easier for researchers to use recently-proposed measures (such as those from the C/W/L framework) alongside traditional measures, potentially encouraging their adoption.
Reconfiguration of Regular Induced Subgraphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

We study the problem of checking the existence of a step-by-step transformation of $d$-regular induced subgraphs in a graph, where $d \ge 0$ and each step in the transformation must follow a fixed reconfiguration rule. Our problem for $d=0$ is equivalent to \textsc{Independent Set Reconfiguration}, which is one of the most well-studied reconfiguration problems. In this paper, we systematically investigate the complexity of the problem, in particular, on chordal graphs and bipartite graphs. Our results give interesting contrasts to known ones for \textsc{Independent Set Reconfiguration}.
Bitemporal Property Graphs to Organize Evolving Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

This work is a summarized view on the results of a one-year cooperation between Oracle Corp. and the University of Leipzig. The goal was to research the organization of relationships within multi-dimensional time-series data, such as sensor data from the IoT area. We showed in this project that temporal property graphs with some extensions are a prime candidate for this organizational task that combines the strengths of both data models (graph and time-series). The outcome of the cooperation includes four achievements: (1) a bitemporal property graph model, (2) a temporal graph query language, (3) a conception of continuous event detection, and (4) a prototype of a bitemporal graph database that supports the model, language and event detection.
A Trust and Reputation System for IoT Exploiting Distributed Ledger Technology
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

The advent of Bitcoin, and consequently Blockchain, has ushered in a new era of decentralization. Blockchain enables mutually distrusting entities to work collaboratively to attain a common objective. However, current Blockchain technologies lack scalability, which limits their use in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Many devices on the Internet have the computational and communication capabilities to facilitate decision-making. These devices will soon be a 50 billion node network. Furthermore, new IoT business models such as Sensor-as-a-Service (SaaS) require a robust Trust and Reputation System (TRS). In this paper, we introduce an innovative distributed ledger combining Tangle and Blockchain as a TRS framework for IoT. The combination of Tangle and Blockchain provides maintainability of the former and scalability of the latter. The proposed ledger can handle large numbers of IoT device transactions and facilitates low power nodes joining and contributing. Employing a distributed ledger mitigates many threats, such as whitewashing attacks. Along with combining payments and rating protocols, the proposed approach provides cleaner data to the upper layer reputation algorithm.
Inside Out Visual Place Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is generally concerned with localizing outdoor images. However, localizing indoor scenes that contain part of an outdoor scene can be of large value for a wide range of applications. In this paper, we introduce Inside Out Visual Place Recognition (IOVPR), a task aiming to localize images based on outdoor scenes visible through windows. For this task we present the new large-scale dataset Amsterdam-XXXL, with images taken in Amsterdam, that consists of 6.4 million panoramic street-view images and 1000 user-generated indoor queries. Additionally, we introduce a new training protocol Inside Out Data Augmentation to adapt Visual Place Recognition methods for localizing indoor images, demonstrating the potential of Inside Out Visual Place Recognition. We empirically show the benefits of our proposed data augmentation scheme on a smaller scale, whilst demonstrating the difficulty of this large-scale dataset for existing methods. With this new task we aim to encourage development of methods for IOVPR. The dataset and code are available for research purposes at https://github.com/saibr/IOVPR
Academic Lobification: Low-performance Control Strategy for Long-planed Academic Purpose
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Academic lobification refers to a collection of academic performance control strategies, methods, and means that a student deliberately hides academic behaviors, or deliberately lowers academic performance, or deliberately delays academic returns for a certain long-term purpose, but does not produce academic risks. Understanding academic lobification is essential to our ability to compensate for inherent deviations in the evaluation of students' academic performance, discover gifted student, reap benefits and minimize harms. It outlines a set of questions that are fundamental to this emerging interdisciplinary research field, including research object, research question, research scope, research method, and explores the technical, legal and other constraints on the study of academic lobification.
A Novel GPR-Based Prediction Model for Cylic Backbone Curves of Reinforced Concrete Shear Walls
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2021
Year: 2021

Backbone curves are used to characterize nonlinear responses of structural elements by simplifying the cyclic force-deformation relationships. Accurate modeling of cyclic behavior can be achieved with a reliable backbone curve model. In this paper, a novel machine learning-based model is proposed to predict the backbone curve of reinforced concrete shear (structural) walls based on key wall design properties. Reported experimental responses of a detailed test database consisting of 384 reinforced concrete shear walls under cyclic loading were utilized to predict seven critical points to define the backbone curves, namely: shear at cracking point; shear and displacement at yielding point; and peak shear force and corresponding displacement; and ultimate displacement and corresponding shear. The predictive models were developed based on the Gaussian Process Regression method (GPR), which adopts a non-parametric Bayesian approach. The ability of the proposed GPR-based model to make accurate and robust estimations for the backbone curves was validated based on unseen data using a hundred random sampling procedure. The prediction accuracies (i.e., ratio of predicted/actual values) are close to 1.0, whereas the coefficient of determination (R2) values range between 0.90-0.97 for all backbone points. The proposed GPR-based backbone models are shown to reflect cyclic behavior more accurately than the traditional methods, therefore, they would serve the earthquake engineering community for better evaluation of the seismic performance of existing buildings.
A Reinforcement Learning Approach for the Continuous Electricity Market of Germany: Trading from the Perspective of a Wind Park Operator
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

With the rising extension of renewable energies, the intraday electricity markets have recorded a growing popularity amongst traders as well as electric utilities to cope with the induced volatility of the energy supply. Through their short trading horizon and continuous nature, the intraday markets offer the ability to adjust trading decisions from the day-ahead market or reduce trading risk in a short-term notice. Producers of renewable energies utilize the intraday market to lower their forecast risk, by modifying their provided capacities based on current forecasts. However, the market dynamics are complex due to the fact that the power grids have to remain stable and electricity is only partly storable. Consequently, robust and intelligent trading strategies are required that are capable to operate in the intraday market. In this work, we propose a novel autonomous trading approach based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms as a possible solution. For this purpose, we model the intraday trade as a Markov Decision Problem (MDP) and employ the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm as our DRL approach. A simulation framework is introduced that enables the trading of the continuous intraday price in a resolution of one minute steps. We test our framework in a case study from the perspective of a wind park operator. We include next to general trade information both price and wind forecasts. On a test scenario of German intraday trading results from 2018, we are able to outperform multiple baselines with at least 45.24% improvement, showing the advantage of the DRL algorithm. However, we also discuss limitations and enhancements of the DRL agent, in order to increase the performance in future works.
Gradient-SDF: A Semi-Implicit Surface Representation for 3D Reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We present Gradient-SDF, a novel representation for 3D geometry that combines the advantages of implict and explicit representations. By storing at every voxel both the signed distance field as well as its gradient vector field, we enhance the capability of implicit representations with approaches originally formulated for explicit surfaces. As concrete examples, we show that (1) the Gradient-SDF allows us to perform direct SDF tracking from depth images, using efficient storage schemes like hash maps, and that (2) the Gradient-SDF representation enables us to perform photometric bundle adjustment directly in a voxel representation (without transforming into a point cloud or mesh), naturally a fully implicit optimization of geometry and camera poses and easy geometry upsampling. Experimental results confirm that this leads to significantly sharper reconstructions. Since the overall SDF voxel structure is still respected, the proposed Gradient-SDF is equally suited for (GPU) parallelization as related approaches.
Non-Convex Recovery from Phaseless Low-Resolution Blind Deconvolution Measurements using Noisy Masked Patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

This paper addresses recovery of a kernel $\boldsymbol{h}\in \mathbb{C}^{n}$ and a signal $\boldsymbol{x}\in \mathbb{C}^{n}$ from the low-resolution phaseless measurements of their noisy circular convolution $\boldsymbol{y} = \left \rvert \boldsymbol{F}_{lo}( \boldsymbol{x}\circledast \boldsymbol{h}) \right \rvert^{2} + \boldsymbolη$, where $\boldsymbol{F}_{lo}\in \mathbb{C}^{m\times n}$ stands for a partial discrete Fourier transform ($m<n$), $\boldsymbolη$ models the noise, and $\lvert \cdot \rvert$ is the element-wise absolute value function. This problem is severely ill-posed because both the kernel and signal are unknown and, in addition, the measurements are phaseless, leading to many $\boldsymbol{x}$-$\boldsymbol{h}$ pairs that correspond to the measurements. Therefore, to guarantee a stable recovery of $\boldsymbol{x}$ and $\boldsymbol{h}$ from $\boldsymbol{y}$, we assume that the kernel $\boldsymbol{h}$ and the signal $\boldsymbol{x}$ lie in known subspaces of dimensions $k$ and $s$, respectively, such that $m\gg k+s$. We solve this problem by proposing a blind deconvolution algorithm for phaseless super-resolution (BliPhaSu) to minimize a non-convex least-squares objective function. The method first estimates a low-resolution version of both signals through a spectral algorithm, which are then refined based upon a sequence of stochastic gradient iterations. We show that our BliPhaSu algorithm converges linearly to a pair of true signals on expectation under a proper initialization that is based on spectral method. Numerical results from experimental data demonstrate perfect recovery of both $\boldsymbol{h}$ and $\boldsymbol{x}$ using our method.